"A child's learning is the function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher." James Coleman, 1972

Sunday, June 29, 2014

Kevin Carey Plays His Fear Card about American Colleges: It's a Deuce

With ALEC far on in writing model legislation to put steerage of higher education under the ham hands of the Tea Party and the Oligarchs (sounds like the worst band ever, right?), and with the federal government too in debt to the oligarchs to do anything about it, the only remaining stumbling block is the need to convince the public that higher ed is going to hell in a hand basket. Enter, Kevin Carey, to declare all rotten in higher ed. His evidence? Another test, of course, this one designed by the same international cabal that has turned the world PISA-centric with its periodic econometric analyses and ruminations on the meaning of childhood and learning around the world from the vantage point of a #2 pencil. Now PISA-ria has done as much for college graduates, whose knowledge can now be indicated on a bar graph that represents the results of, yet, another meaningless test. The thing that is most puzzling about Carey's contentions in the New York Times is his claim that there is some connection between American scores on a post-bacculareate literacy test and how many jobs the new wolves of Wall Street ship overseas to take advantage of slave labor among children who can't read. I don't get it:

"While American college graduates
are far more knowledgeable than American nongraduates, creating a substantial “wage premium” for diploma holders, they look
mediocre or worse compared to their college-educated peers in other nations.

This reality should worry anyone
who believes — as many economists do — that America’s long-term prosperity
rests in substantial part on its store of human capital. The relatively high
pay of American workers will start to erode as more jobs are exposed to harsh
competition in global labor markets. It will be increasingly dangerous to
believe that only our K-12 schools have serious problems."

Am I missing something here? Not only has Carey taken for granted that Americans are agreed that elementary and high schools suck, but that now we are in danger if we do not believe the same about colleges.

In fact, the quality of colleges, whether real or measured by a decontextualized idiot test, has nothing to do with how many American jobs are exported by oligarchs into nations where school a pipe dream for factory workers who work for pennies an hour. Nor does the quality of American colleges as measured by fool technocrats have anything to do with the suffering of the American workforce.

how workers at the
bottom fare in relation to the typical worker, with a lower number implying
more inequality. As the figure shows, earnings at the 10th percentile in the
United States are less than half (47.4 percent) of those of the typical worker.
This is the lowest share in the figure and is far below the (unweighted) peer
average of 62.0 percent.

The U. S. is the only advanced economy that does not require paid vacation for employees.

The
American middle class, long the most affluent in the world, has lost that
distinction.

While the wealthiest Americans are
outpacing many of their global peers, a New York Times analysis shows that
across the lower- and middle-income tiers, citizens of other advanced countries
have received considerably larger raises over the last three decades.

After-tax middle-class incomes in
Canada — substantially behind in 2000 — now appear to be higher than in the
United States. The poor in much of Europe earn more than poor Americans.